Mike Leigh To Start Shooting This Year For A Secret New Project (Exclusive)

Mike Leigh will enter production this year on his as-yet-untitled super-secret and now highly anticipated next feature film, The Hollywood Reporter can reveal

In typical style for the beloved veteran filmmaker and seven-time Oscar nominee, there’s little else to reveal. Untitled Mike Leigh 2023as the project is now called, is as hidden as when it was first announced that he would be starting work on a new film in 2020 (when it was titled Untitled 2020). Plot, cast and practically everything else is kept behind the thick veil of secrecy favored by the author. What is known is that the film was set to go into production in 2020, but was one of the feature films affected by the COVID pandemic. Three years later, and the wheels are finally turning.

Despite the secrecy (ie THR understands that it is not only restricted to the public domain, but also to buyers), Bleeker Street has already acquired the Film4-backed feature for the US – the first collaboration with the director – while eOne has UK rights, ending the long-standing relationship continued with Leigh and his Third Man Films banner. Cornerstone Films handles the international sales and brings the project (back) to Berlin.

Funding comes from Film4, Ingenious and Spanish company The Mediapro Studio, who act as co-producers. Georgina Lowe produces for Thin Man, with Gail Egan serving as executive producer.

Untitled Mike Leigh 2023 is the sequel to Leigh’s 2018 period epic Peterloo, his largest and boldest film in his 50 years of directorial work, which explored the events surrounding the Peterloo massacre in 1819, in which cavalry attacked a mob of people who had gathered to demand the reform of parliamentary representation and is regarded as one of the most infamous and defining moments in British history. Amazon backed the film, leading Leigh to tell THR at a time when all his films were financed to some degree by a “reprehensible power.”